the professional
writer must establish a daily schedule and stick to it. I said that
writing is a craft, not an art, and that the man who runs away from
his craft because he lacks inspiration is fooling
himself.

位置267-273

Is there any way
to recognize clutter at a glance? Here’s a device my students at
Yale found helpful. I would put brackets around every component in
a piece of writing that wasn’t doing useful work. Often just one
word got bracketed: the unnecessary preposition appended to a verb
(“order up”), or the adverb that carries the same meaning as the
verb (“smile happily”), or the adjective that states a known fact
(“tall skyscraper”). Often my brackets surrounded the little
qualifiers that weaken any sentence they inhabit (“a bit,” “sort
of”), or phrases like “in a sense,” which don’t mean anything.
Sometimes my brackets surrounded an entire sentence—the one that
essentially repeats what the previous sentence said, or that says
something readers don’t need to know or can figure out for
themselves. Most first drafts can be cut by 50 percent without
losing any information or losing the author’s
voice.

位置304-305 | 已添加至
2013年7月26日 星期五 13:03:58

There is no style
store; style is organic to the person doing the writing, as much a
part of him as his hair, or, if he is bald, his lack of it. Trying
to add style is like adding a toupee.

- 我的标注 位置376-387 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 15:50:34

“Who am I writing
for?” It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer:
You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass
audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different
person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to
publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors
and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it.
Besides, they’re always looking for something new. Don’t worry
about whether the reader will “get it” if you indulge a sudden
impulse for humor. If it amuses you in the act of writing, put it
in. (It can always be taken out, but only you can put it in.) You
are writing primarily to please yourself, and if you go about it
with enjoyment you will also entertain the readers who are worth
writing for. If you lose the dullards back in the dust, you don’t
want them anyway. This may seem to be a paradox. Earlier I warned
that the reader is an impatient bird, perched on the thin edge of
distraction or sleep. Now I’m saying you must write for yourself
and not be gnawed by worry over whether the reader is tagging
along. I’m talking about two different issues. One is craft, the
other is attitude. The first is a question of mastering a precise
skill. The second is a question of how you use that skill to
express your personality.

==========

- 我的标注 位置614-615 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 18:42:55

Be liberal in
accepting new words and phrases, but conservative in
grammar.

==========

- 我的标注 位置620-621 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 18:44:13

The only trouble
with accepting words that entered the language overnight is that
they often leave just as abruptly.

==========

- 我的标注 位置627-627 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 18:46:42

Incorrect usage
will lose you the readers you would most like to
win.

==========

- 我的标注 位置706-712 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:46:25

What annoys us is
that the writer never decided what kind of article he wanted to
write or how he wanted to approach us. He comes at us in many
guises, depending on what kind of material he is trying to purvey.
Instead of controlling his material, his material is controlling
him. That wouldn’t happen if he took time to establish certain
unities. Therefore ask yourself some basic questions before you
start. For example: “In what capacity am I going to address the
reader?” (Reporter? Provider of information? Average man or woman?)
“What pronoun and tense am I going to use?” “What style?”
(Impersonal reportorial? Personal but formal? Personal and casual?)
“What attitude am I going to take toward the material?” (Involved?
Detached? Judgmental? Ironic? Amused?) “How much do I want to
cover?” “What one point do I want to make?” The last two questions
are especially important.

==========

- 我的标注 位置718-719 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:46:42

think small.
Decide what corner of your subject you’re going to bite off, and be
content to cover it well and stop.

==========

- 我的标注 位置721-723 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:47:03

As for what point
you want to make, every successful piece of nonfiction should leave
the reader with one provocative thought that he or she didn’t have
before. Not two thoughts, or five—just one. So decide what single
point you want to leave in the reader’s mind.

==========

- 我的标注 位置740-743 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:56:05

The most important
sentence in any article is the first one. If it doesn’t induce the
reader to proceed to the second sentence, your article is dead. And
if the second sentence doesn’t induce him to continue to the third
sentence, it’s equally dead. Of such a progression of sentences,
each tugging the reader forward until he is hooked, a writer
constructs that fateful unit, the “lead.”

==========

- 我的标注 位置750-752 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:56:34

your lead must
capture the reader immediately and force him to keep reading. It
must cajole him with freshness, or novelty, or paradox, or humor,
or surprise, or with an unusual idea, or an interesting fact, or a
question. Anything will do, as long as it nudges his curiosity and
tugs at his sleeve.

==========

- 我的标注 位置755-757 |
已添加至 2013年7月26日 星期五 23:57:36

take special care
with the last sentence of each paragraph—it’s the crucial
springboard to the next paragraph. Try to give that sentence an
extra twist of humor or surprise, like the periodic “snapper” in
the routine of a stand-up comic. Make the reader smile and you’ve
got him for at least one more paragraph.

==========

- 我的标注 位置893-894 |
已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 0:18:11

The perfect ending
should take your readers slightly by surprise and yet seem exactly
right.

==========

- 我的标注 位置898-899 |
已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 0:19:22

For the nonfiction
writer, the simplest way of putting this into a rule is: when
you’re ready to stop, stop. If you have presented all the facts and
made the point you want to make, look for the nearest
exit.

==========

- 我的标注 位置899-901 |
已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 0:20:49

Often it takes
just a few sentences to wrap things up. Ideally they should
encapsulate the idea of the piece and conclude with a sentence that
jolts us with its fitness or unexpectedness.

==========

- 我的标注 位置908-911 |
已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 0:21:38

Something I often
do in my writing is to bring the story full circle—to strike at the
end an echo of a note that was sounded at the beginning. It
gratifies my sense of symmetry, and it also pleases the reader,
completing with its resonance the journey we set out on together.
But what usually works best is a quotation. Go back through your
notes to find some remark that has a sense of finality, or that’s
funny, or that adds an unexpected closing
detail.

==========

- 我的标注 位置994-994 |
已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 8:41:48

Humor is best
achieved by understatement, and there’s nothing subtle about an
exclamation point.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1016-1020
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 8:47:19

Many of us were
taught that no sentence should begin with “but.” If that’s what you
learned, unlearn it—there’s no stronger word at the start. It
announces total contrast with what has gone before, and the reader
is thereby primed for the change. If you need relief from too many
sentences beginning with “but,” switch to “however.” It is,
however, a weaker word and needs careful placement. Don’t start a
sentence with “however”—it hangs there like a wet dishrag. And
don’t end with “however”—by that time it has lost its howeverness.
Put it as early as you reasonably can, as I did three sentences
ago. Its abruptness then becomes a virtue.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1040-1040
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 14:20:30

Always use “that”
unless it makes your meaning ambiguous.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1076-1076
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 14:26:09

Don’t
overstate.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1170-1171
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 14:34:05

Rewriting is the
essence of writing well: it’s where the game is won or
lost.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1282-1285
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 14:42:26

The reader plays a
major role in the act of writing and must be given room to play it.
Don’t annoy your readers by over-explaining—by telling them
something they already know or can figure out. Try not to use words
like “surprisingly,” “predictably” and “of course,” which put a
value on a fact before the reader encounters the fact. Trust your
material.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1517-1517
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 14:59:06

When you use a
quotation, start the sentence with it. Don’t lead up to it with a
vapid phrase saying what the man said.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1577-1582
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 19:49:16

I have no problem
calling “Mr. Hunter’s Grave” nonfiction. Although Mitchell altered
the truth about elapsed time, he used a dramatist’s prerogative to
compress and focus his story, thereby giving the reader a
manageable framework. If he had told the story in real time, strung
across all the days and months he did spend on Staten Island, he
would have achieved the numbing truth of Andy Warhol’s eight-hour
film of a man having an eight-hour sleep. By careful manipulation
he raised the craft of nonfiction to art. But he never manipulated
Mr. Hunter’s truth; there has been no “inferring,” no
“fabricating.” He has played fair. That, finally, is my
standard.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1582-1586
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 19:50:51

I know that it’s
just not possible to write a competent interview without some
juggling and eliding of quotes; don’t believe any writer who claims
he never does it. But many shades of opinion exist on both sides of
mine. Purists would say that Joseph Mitchell has taken a novelist’s
wand to the facts. Progressives would say that Mitchell was a
pioneer—that he anticipated by several decades the “new journalism”
that writers like Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe were hailed for
inventing in the 1960s, using fictional techniques of imagined
dialogue and emotion to give narrative flair to works whose facts
they had punctiliously researched. Both views are partly
right.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1586-1588
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 19:52:26

What’s wrong, I
believe, is to fabricate quotes or to surmise what someone might
have said. Writing is a public trust. The nonfiction writer’s rare
privilege is to have the whole wonderful world of real people to
write about. When you get people talking, handle what they say as
you would handle a valuable gift.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1608-1610
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 19:56:15

As a writer you
must keep a tight rein on your subjective self—the traveler touched
by new sights and sounds and smells—and keep an objective eye on
the reader. The article that records everything you did on your
trip will fascinate you because it was your trip. Will it fascinate
the reader? It won’t. The mere agglomeration of detail is no free
pass to the reader’s interest. The detail must be
significant.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1621-1630
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 20:01:01

How can you
overcome such fearful odds and write well about a place? My advice
can be reduced to two principles—one of style, the other of
substance. First, choose your words with unusual care. If a phrase
comes to you easily, look at it with deep suspicion; it’s probably
one of the countless clichés that have woven their way so tightly
into the fabric of travel writing that you have to make a special
effort not to use them. Also resist straining for the luminous
lyrical phrase to describe the wondrous waterfall. At best it will
make you sound artificial—unlike yourself—and at worst pompous.
Strive for fresh words and images. Leave “myriad” and their ilk to
the poets. Leave “ilk” to anyone who will take it away. As for
substance, be intensely selective. If you are describing a beach,
don’t write that “the shore was scattered with rocks” or that
“occasionally a seagull flew over.” Shores have a tendency to be
scattered with rocks and to be flown over by seagulls. Eliminate
every such fact that is a known attribute: don’t tell us that the
sea had waves and the sand was white. Find details that are
significant. They may be important to your narrative; they may be
unusual, or colorful, or comic, or entertaining. But make sure they
do useful work.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1734-1738
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 20:22:52

Practice writing
this kind of travel piece, and just because I call it a travel
piece I don’t mean you have to go to Morocco or Mombasa. Go to your
local mall, or bowling alley, or day-care center. But whatever
place you write about, go there often enough to isolate the
qualities that make it distinctive. Usually this will be some
combination of the place and the people who inhabit it. If it’s
your local bowling alley it will be a mixture of the atmosphere
inside and the regular patrons. If it’s a foreign city it will be a
mixture of the ancient culture and the present populace. Try to
find it.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1753-1754
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 20:25:48

I’ll never be able
to visit Turkey again without noticing its sitters. With one quick
insight Pritchett has caught a whole national trait. This is the
essence of good writing about other countries.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1761-1762
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 20:28:18

when you write
about a place, try to draw the best out of it. But if the process
should work in reverse, let it draw the best out of
you.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1806-1807
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 20:32:51

Beware of waxing.
If you’re writing about places that are sacred or meaningful, leave
the waxing to someone else.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1836-1841
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 21:47:44

If you’re a
writing teacher, make your students believe in the validity of
their lives. If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to tell
us who you are. By “permission” I don’t mean “permissive.” I have
no patience with sloppy workmanship—the let-it-all-hang-out
verbiage of the ’60s. To have a decent career in this country it’s
important to be able to write decent English. But on the question
of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please. If you
consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you’ll end up not
writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you’ll
reach

==========

- 我的标注 位置1836-1841
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 21:47:59

If you’re a
writing teacher, make your students believe in the validity of
their lives. If you’re a writer, give yourself permission to tell
us who you are. By “permission” I don’t mean “permissive.” I have
no patience with sloppy workmanship—the let-it-all-hang-out
verbiage of the ’60s. To have a decent career in this country it’s
important to be able to write decent English. But on the question
of who you’re writing for, don’t be eager to please. If you
consciously write for a teacher or for an editor, you’ll end up not
writing for anybody. If you write for yourself, you’ll reach the
people you want to write for.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1849-1850
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 21:58:31

Write about
yourself, by all means, with confidence and with pleasure. But see
that all the details—people, places, events, anecdotes, ideas,
emotions—are moving your story steadily along.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1857-1859
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 22:01:01

What gives them
their power is the narrowness of their focus. Unlike autobiography,
which spans an entire life, memoir assumes the life and ignores
most of it. The memoir writer takes us back to some corner of his
or her past that was unusually intense—childhood, for instance—or
that was framed by war or some other social
upheaval.

==========

- 我的标注 位置1865-1871
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 22:17:21

Think narrow,
then, when you try the form. Memoir isn’t the summary of a life;
it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its
selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random
calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate
construction. Thoreau wrote seven different drafts of Walden in
eight years; no American memoir was more painstakingly pieced
together. To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your
own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a
narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of
inventing the truth. One secret of the art is detail. Any kind of
detail will work—a sound or a smell or a song title—as long as it
played a shaping role in the portion of your life you have chosen
to distill.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2021-2023
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 22:36:34

writing is not a
special language owned by the English teacher. Writing is thinking
on paper. Anyone who thinks clearly can write clearly, about
anything at all. Science, demystified, is just another nonfiction
subject. Writing, demystified, is just another way for scientists
to transmit what they know.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2033-2034
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 23:03:48

A tenet of
journalism is that “the reader knows nothing.” As tenets go, it’s
not flattering, but a technical writer can never forget it. You
can’t assume that your readers know what you assume everybody
knows, or that they still remember what was once explained to
them.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2037-2040
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 23:04:56

Describing how a
process works is valuable for two reasons. It forces you to make
sure you know how it works. Then it forces you to take the reader
through the same sequence of ideas and deductions that made the
process clear to you. I’ve found it to be a breakthrough for many
students whose thinking was disorderly.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2140-2141
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 23:28:17

Always start with
too much material. Then give your reader just
enough.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2189-2190
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 23:47:05

The principle of
sequential writing applies to every field where the reader must be
escorted over difficult new terrain.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2214-2215
| 已添加至 2013年7月27日 星期六 23:51:28

never forgets
where he left his readers in the previous paragraph and what they
want to know next.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2342-2342
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 0:05:14

my four articles
of faith: clarity, simplicity, brevity and
humanity.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2383-2385
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 0:08:39

Managers at every
level are prisoners of the notion that a simple style reflects a
simple mind. Actually a simple style is the result of hard work and
hard thinking; a muddled style reflects a muddled thinker or a
person too arrogant, or too dumb, or too lazy to organize his
thoughts.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2440-2441
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 9:40:28

The best
sportswriters know this. They avoid the exhausted synonyms and
strive for freshness elsewhere in their
sentences.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2540-2541
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 9:57:50

Red Smith had no
patience with self-important sportswriting. He said it was always
helpful to remember that baseball is a game that little boys
play.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2640-2643
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:23:22

True wit, however,
is rare, and a thousand barbed arrows fall at the feet of the
archer for every one that flies. It’s also too facile an approach
if you want to write serious criticism, for the only epigrams that
have survived are cruel ones. It’s far easier to bury Caesar than
to praise him—and that goes for Cleopatra, too. But to say why you
think a play is good, in words that don’t sound banal, is one of
the hardest chores in the business.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2672-2676
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:25:28

In book reviewing
this means allowing the author’s words to do their own
documentation. Don’t say that Tom Wolfe’s style is gaudy and
unusual. Quote a few of his gaudy and unusual sentences and let the
reader see how quirky they are. In reviewing a play, don’t just
tell us that the set is “striking.” Describe its various levels, or
how it is ingeniously lit, or how it helps the actors to make their
entrances and exits as a conventional set would not. Put your
readers in your theater seat. Help them to see what you
saw.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2755-2756
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:33:20

One lubricant in
criticism is humor. It allows the critic to come at a work
obliquely and to write a piece that is itself an entertainment. But
the column should be an organic piece of writing, not just a few
rabbit punches of wit.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2798-2802
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:41:37

What is crucial
for you as the writer is to express your opinion firmly. Don’t
cancel its strength with last-minute evasions and escapes. The most
boring sentence in the daily newspaper is the last sentence of the
editorial, which says “It is too early to tell whether the new
policy will work” or “The effectiveness of the decision remains to
be seen.” If it’s too early to tell, don’t bother us with it, and
as for what remains to be seen, everything remains to be seen. Take
your stand with conviction.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2808-2810
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:42:50

“Well,” the man
from Texas would break in, “let’s not go peeing down both legs.” It
was a plea he made often, and it was the most inelegant advice I
ever received. But over a long career of writing reviews and
columns and trying to make a point I felt strongly about, it was
also probably the best.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2868-2872
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:52:54

What made those
pieces work was that they stuck close to the form they were
parodying. Humor may seem to be an act of gross exaggeration. But
the hair curler letters wouldn’t succeed if we didn’t recognize
them as a specific journalistic form, both in their style and in
their mentality. Control is vital to humor. Don’t use comical names
like Throttlebottom. Don’t make the same kind of joke two or three
times—readers will enjoy themselves more if you make it only once.
Trust the sophistication of readers who do know what you’re doing,
and don’t worry about the rest.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2886-2888
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:55:04

“I’m here and I’m
involved”: make that your creed if you want to write serious humor.
Humorists operate on a deeper current than most people suspect.
They must be willing to go against the grain, to say what the
populace and the President may not want to
hear.

==========

- 我的标注 位置2905-2908
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 10:57:47

I suggest several
principles for the writer of humor. Master the craft of writing
good “straight” English; humorists from Mark Twain to Russell Baker
are, first of all, superb writers. Don’t search for the outlandish
and scorn what seems too ordinary; you will touch more chords by
finding what’s funny in what you know to be true. Finally, don’t
strain for laughs; humor is built on surprise, and you can surprise
the reader only so often.

==========

- 我的标注 位置3106-3107
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 11:36:20

In short, our
class began by striving first for humor and hoping to wing a few
truths along the way. We ended by striving for truth and hoping to
add humor along the way. Ultimately we realized that the two are
intertwined.

==========

- 我的标注 位置3117-3119
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:40:33

Don’t alter your
voice to fit your subject. Develop one voice that readers will
recognize when they hear it on the page, a voice that’s enjoyable
not only in its musical line but in its avoidance of sounds that
would cheapen its tone: breeziness and condescension and
clichés.

==========

- 我的标注 位置3128-3131
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:42:01

Nothing about it
is accidental. It’s a disciplined act of writing. The grammar is
formal, the words are plain and precise, and the cadences are those
of a poet. That’s the effortless style at its best: a methodical
act of composition that disarms us with its generated warmth. The
writer sounds confident; he’s not trying to ingratiate himself with
the reader.

==========

- 我的标注 位置3131-3133
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:43:11

Inexperienced
writers miss this point. They think that all they have to do to
achieve a casual effect is to be “just folks”—good old Betty or Bob
chatting over the back fence. They want to be a pal to the reader.
They’re so eager not to appear formal that they don’t even try to
write good English.

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- 我的标注 位置3145-3145
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:44:31

Write with respect
for the English language at its best—and for readers at their
best.

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- 我的标注 位置3170-3170
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:59:01

Clichés are the
enemy of taste.

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- 我的标注 位置3171-3172
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 13:59:33

freshness is
crucial. Taste chooses words that have surprise, strength and
precision.

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- 我的标注 位置3273-3274
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 14:16:13

Writing is such
lonely work that I try to keep myself cheered
up.

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- 我的标注 位置3350-3352
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 14:24:55

my article was
received by the birding community as a definitive portrait of
Peterson. I mention this to give confidence to all nonfiction
writers: a point of craft. If you master the tools of the trade—the
fundamentals of interviewing and of orderly construction—and if you
bring to the assignment your general intelligence and your
humanity, you can write about any subject. That’s your ticket to an
interesting life.

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- 我的标注 位置3466-3467
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 14:56:51

By far the biggest
problem was compression: how to distill a coherent narrative from a
huge and tangled mass of experiences and feelings and
memories.

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- 我的标注 位置3570-3571
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 15:13:31

what do your
readers want to know next? Ask yourself that question after every
sentence.

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- 我的标注 位置3851-3855
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 16:21:13

one of the
questions often asked by memoir writers is: Should I write from the
point of view of the child I once was, or of the adult I am now?
The strongest memoirs, I think, are those that preserve the unity
of a remembered time and place: books like Russell Baker’s Growing
Up, or V.S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door, or Jill Ker Conway’s The
Road from Coorain, which recall what it was like to be a child or
an adolescent in a world of adults contending with life’s
adversities.

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- 我的标注 位置3855-3856
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 16:35:18

But if you prefer
the other route—to write about your younger years from the wiser
perspective of your older years—that memoir will have its own
integrity.

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- 我的标注 位置3900-3901
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 16:40:22

you are the
protagonist in your memoir—the tour guide. You must find a
narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never
relinquish control.

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- 我的标注 位置3939-3942
| 已添加至 2013年7月28日 星期日 16:52:13

My final reducing
advice can be summed up in two words: Think small. Don’t rummage
around in your past—or your family’s past—to find episodes that you
think are “important” enough to be worthy of including in your
memoir. Look for small self-contained incidents that are still
vivid in your memory. If you still remember them it’s because they
contain a universal truth that your readers will recognize from
their own life.